280 Dr, Charles Waldsteiii [April 13, 



Nay, they become the home for general education, where even in- 

 tellectual training is carried on, and the philosophers form their 

 circles of eager learners. As I have said before, it is here that the 

 artists studied the human form in rest and action. It is here that 

 the systematic training of each organ of the human body brought 

 home to them the plastic anatomy of man, and that in the a-KLajjia^ia, in 

 which the various stages of each game were gone through, the sculptor 

 had impressed upon his eye in living statues the typical attitudes of 

 each game. 



A still more direct proof is to be found in the fact that in this 

 period the custom arose of commemorating athletic victories by 

 statues. And now, as I have said above, the sculptor is brought 

 face to face with man, and must bend his art and craft to the service 

 of actual nature. According to Pausanias the first statues set up to 

 athletic victors were those of Praxidamas and of Rhexibios, who were 

 victors in the fifty-ninth and sixty-first Olympiads, that is, about 

 530 B.C. They were of wood, and, according to his description of the 

 one to Arrhachion, were very similar to the statue of the Apollo of 

 Tenea. The influence of the pala3stra and the introduction of the 

 custom of erecting statues to victors did not take immediate effect, or 

 at once convert imperfect art to a state of perfection, but it was inch 

 by inch that conventionality strove to maintain its ground, and step 

 by step that art advanced towards nature within this comparatively 

 short period of fifty years. So we can see in the extant statues the 

 gradual growth of freedom and the falling away of the archaic 

 fetters. In these three instances we have the chief stages of thia 

 progress. In the Apollo of Tenea at Munich, in attitude, in 

 the composition of the parts of the body and in the modelling of 

 the surface, we have hardness and woodenness far removed from 

 the actual appearance of the living organism. In the so-called 

 " Strangford Apollo," in the British Museum, in whom I see an 

 athlete belonging to the school of ^gina, we have a great advance 

 in the direction of nature. Though the attitude is still conventional, 

 the feet placed one before the other, the arms pinned to the sides, the 

 head straight forward at right angles to the chest, the limbs seem 

 joined more organically to the body, and, above all, the surface is 

 modelled so as to present a continuous rise and fall, not an abrupt 

 succession of ridges put together, and to suggest the various organs 

 which it covers. Still, though the growing feeling and desire for 

 rendering nature is manifest in this work, we notice a struggle in 

 overcoming the difficulties presented by the material. The traces of 

 conventionality are but very slight in this third statue, the Choiseul- 

 Gouffier Pugilist, formerly known as an Apollo. This work is most 

 probably the work of Pythagoras of Ehegion, a sculptor who stood 

 on the very border line between dying archaism and the vigorous life of 

 fierce naturalistic art. Here freedom is given to the attitude (a typical 

 one in a certain stage of boxing) : the athlete rests upon one leg more 

 than upon the other, the arms arc freely extended, and, above all, the 



